Data warehousing and knowledge discovery has been widely accepted as a key te- nology for enterprises and organizations to improve their abilities in data analysis, decision support, and the automatic extraction of knowledge from data. With the exponentially growing amount of information to be included in the decision-making process, the data to be considered become more and more complex in both structure and semantics. New developments such as cloud computing add to the challenges with massive scaling, a new computing infrastructure, and new types of data. Consequently, the process of retrieval and knowledge discovery from this huge amount of heterogeneous complex data forms the litmus test for research in the area. In the last decade, the International Conference on Data Warehousing and Kno- edge Discovery (DaWaK) has become one of the most important international sci- tific events bringing together researchers, developers, and practitioners to discuss the latest research issues and experiences in developing and deploying data warehousing and knowledge discovery systems, applications, and solutions. th This year’s conference, the 12 International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery (DaWaK 2010), continued the tradition by discussing and disseminating innovative principles, methods, algorithms, and solutions to challe- ing problems faced in the development of data warehousing, knowledge discovery, the emerging area of "cloud intelligence," and applications within these areas. In order to better reflect novel trends and the diversity of topics, the conference was organized in four tracks: Cloud Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Knowledge Discovery, and Industry and Applications.
